Theoretical ecology articles from across Nature Portfolio

The authors use stomach contents from six fish species sampled for 12 years to show that warming shifts foraging behaviour to favour consumption of less energetically rewarding prey. Using food web models, they show that this flexible foraging could lead to reduced community biodiversity.

Soil pathogen dilution can improve plant production. Here, the authors combine an empirical and theoretical approaches finding that specialist pathogens suppress yield in monocultures while pathogen dilution drives yield benefits in diverse plant communities.

Ecosystems must be able to bounce back from perturbations to persist without species extinctions. This study uses theoretical modelling to show the importance of reactivity—how species respond in the short term to perturbations—for assessing the health of complex ecosystems, revealing that it can be a better predictor of extinction risk than stability.

Little is known about how the evolution of gut microbiota is impacted by their surrounding community. Here, the authors examine the evolutionary ecology of the human gut microbiome, modelling resource competition to show that local evolutionary history can impact the structure and function of host microbiota.

Species co-occurrences have long been used as proxies for interactions, but not all co-occurring species interact. A study now reveals that super-generalist consumers realize a higher portion of their potential interactions in bipartite networks.

Using a mechanistic model based on neutral theory, we examined the effects of the ‘Carboniferous rainforest collapse’ on early tetrapod diversity. Our findings highlight the power of mechanistic models for decoding the fossil record and underscore the criticality of adjusting for sampling biases.

A computational method that negates the need to directly measure species interactions provides evidence in support of classic theory, stating that microbial communities with higher diversity remain stable as long they have low complexity and weaker interactions.

The mathematics of counting holes reveals hidden paths to species coexistence and the obstacles that block the way.

A large-scale, cross-taxa analysis reveals high nonlinearity and limited long-term predictability in the dynamics of animal populations.